Timing

When measuring the performance of parallel programs, it is usually wall clock time, not CPU time, that matters. The reason is that better parallelization typically increases aggregate CPU time by employing more CPUs. The goal of parallelizing a program is usually to make it run faster in real time.

The class tick_count in Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB) provides a simple interface for measuring wall clock time. A tick_count value obtained from the static method tick_count::now() represents the current absolute time. Subtracting two tick_count values yields a relative time in tick_count::interval_t, which you can convert to seconds, as in the following example:

Unlike some timing interfaces, tick_count is guaranteed to be safe to use across threads. It is valid to subtract tick_count values that were created by different threads. A tick_count difference can be converted to seconds.

The resolution of tick_count corresponds to the highest resolution timing service on the platform that is valid across threads in the same process. Since the CPU timer registers are not valid across threads on some platforms, this means that the resolution of tick_count can not be guaranteed to be consistent across platforms.

Note

On Linux* OS, you may need to add -lrt to the linker command when you use tbb::tick_count class. For more information, see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ChangeInImplicitDSOLinking.